How Google Home Hub Will Impact SEO

Digital assistants and software have been taking the world by storm, and Google Home Hub is no exception. There are many choices for home assistant devices, such as Amazon’s Alexa, but Google Home Hub has several advantages over its competitors, including price (an affordable $99), compatibility with Google Assistant, and crisp, warm images that easily organize and control your smart home devices.

It’s quite possible that Google Home Hub’s abilities and visual technology will change the way SEO works for you and your clients in the near future. Let’s take a look at the possible impacts.

Visual Tech with Google Home & Google Hub: What’s the Difference?

SEO has been moving away from text-only search results for a decade, and users increasingly rely on images to search for products they want or pinpoint the type of product they are looking for. Google Home Hub’s visual display helps users accomplish this.

As you may recall, Google Home is a set of smart speakers that users buy to help them interact with Google Assistant, and while the smart speakers are very nice and come in various friendly shapes, one thing they can’t do is display an image. This can be frustrating when you know what you want but not who makes it or where to get it. This is where Google Home Hub steps in. It features a compact screen with a photo frame and smart home control panel, helping Google Assistant users to see the search engine results instead of just hearing them.

Visual Advantage of Search Results

Visual search technology is the next wave of organic SEO, and your business better be ready for it – it’s coming fast. Intelligent visual search technology has grown by leaps and bounds lately and is now included in many brand apps and websites. You know what it looks like from websites like Pinterest, Bing, and Google, and it has a way of really pinpointing the exact thing users are searching for, right down to color and shape. You can snap an image of something at a big box store and find the price online, as well as competitor pricing, for example, and where to buy it near you. That convenience can’t be beaten, and it’s redefining the lines of online SEO practices.

How Visuals Affect Featured Snippet Ranking

Keep in mind that visual search technology can be a bit more complicated than text-based search, and search engines are literally growing and learning new tactics as images are repeatedly plugged in. These search abilities have recently become more prevalent:

Searching part of an image

Searching with smartphone cameras

Searching with augmented reality apps

Today, about 27% of all searches are visual across platforms like Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, Bing, Amazon, and Facebook. In the SEO world, Google featured snippets are king, and visual images, video, and infographics can help you get there. If your target audience is looking for an image, you need to provide that for them along with a bit of text to get them where they need to go: the chosen website. For SEO, video is one of the top featured snippet types, so focusing on videos before images are the way to go – but don’t forget the images! Pinterest was built on them, after all.

While text content is still important for featured snippets today, visual technology is rapidly catching up and could be the preferred snippet-garnering method in the near future. Make sure your business is prepared for the next step in SEO evolution, and start creating, posting, and featuring those videos, images, and infographics whenever and wherever you can.

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